PORTALE a site-specific installation at USF

PORTALE
Kalmanovitz Hall Atrium and Rooftop Sculpture Terrace
University of San Francisco
February 5 - March 25, 2018
Open weekdays, 9am - 5pm

In Portale, I used two distinct patterns cut from gaudy, repurposed carpets from hotels and casinos to form a path through the portal. At the entrance, the design references tiles from a basilica in Northern Italy where the portal originated. The pattern on the other side draws from the ceiling of San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Basilica featuring an indigenous design painted by the Ohlone people who were imprisoned at the mission. Using gaudy reclaimed carpets from hotels and casinos, I evoke with irony the relationship between the sacred and the profane.

In Portale, I explore ideas of passage and transformation through a site-specific installation that creates a path through the stone portal in Kalmanovitz Hall’s Giraulo Atrium to the Nomadic Labyrinth on the building’s rooftop sculpture terrace. 

Dated 1175-1200, the Romanesque portal featuring Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge was originally from the Chapel of the Penitents in Northern Italy. Taken from its original sacred space and later donated by the de Young Museum to be placed in the heart of an academic building dedicated to the arts and humanities, it is now a reminder of many passages: from one place to another, from the past to the present, from the tangible world to the spiritual realm.

Portale reminds viewers of the dynamics between culture and power, past and present.

Presented by Thacher Gallery